The Reaches

[Near]

He had been trying to exhort Jude to just pull the trigger already, kill the ambiguity and present a straightforward request for whatever help he thought he needed because it would have simplified all of this in an instant, collapsed it into a binary: yes or no. (And, who was he kidding with the no; when was the last time Near had been able to deny a big-eyed plea for help, even knowing it would end, more often than not, with his wallet getting jacked or his hand bitten by a stray cat or him here, half-drunk in the godforsaken Reaches?) Instead, there he went, slipping back into the Twilight Zone script.

Undeniable that the rehashed speech, though its second delivery was just as stilted as the first, was more salient now than it had been when the extent of what he was dealing with seemed to be, at worst, a rain-soaked vagrant. Now it was a vagrant who had accomplished something nightmarish, which didn’t change the fact that he was still dancing circles around what he wanted and Near still had no intention of discussing nightmares with a physically-violent stranger, even to confirm or deny their existence. Bad dreams were a touchy topic, first -- and second, he remained determined to not let Jude feel like he was in charge here.

The last time, he had deflected with the offer of a drink. That was still an option here, with the bar a few paces away. Hell, never mind his teetotalling intruder, he would have liked to sidle over and grab something for his own personal use, to keep the edges smooth -- to shatter Jude’s unnatural bottle while he was at it because that urge kept cockroach scuttling through his head. But it would have meant turning his back, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet.

“You’ve never had to talk for yourself, and that’s what you came up with for the first time, Zhuang Zhou and the goddamn butterfly? Not what I wanted you to ask, kid.”

[Jude]

Jude might have been unversed in how to plea for assistance, but even he understood that 'Please help me save the world' was a bad lead. Save the world from what? From who? How? When? It made more sense to start with the what, to give Near some sense of the stakes, before Jude invested any more time in sketching the situation. It also made sense to feel out Near's willingness to tolerate the terrifying; whatever his character, Jude needed him to have a particular temperament. Which he was increasingly unsure of.

It was awful, living one's whole life amongst people who had always said, Yes, and?, and then suddenly running into someone who said, No. Jude did not follow Near's reference, but the tone was enough to indicate he was being mocked again. And again, with the 'kid'! "You are an asshole."

The wounded animal urge to hide in a hole finally overrode Jude's paralysis. He turned on his heel and exited the room in long, exaggerated strides, walking as fast as he could without breaking into a jog. Plan A was not working. Time for Plan B.

[Near]

He was an asshole?

A jagged thistle of humor blossomed in the blind, bright irony of that name-calling and overshadowed everything else, inspiring a single throaty huff that existed somewhere between laughter and getting kicked in the gut, until it wilted moments later and left him deflated, tracking the kid’s exit stalk through the halflight.

What remained to mingle with the swirl of confusion and irritation and dread was a trickle of injury at the denunciation. Not because it was inaccurate; just that its accuracy derived largely from conduct that Jude hadn’t had the pleasure of witnessing. As far as Near was concerned, he had been a portrait of good behavior in this case. A paragon of hospitality. Snippy, sure, but look what he had been dealing with: it cried out for minimization. An asshole wouldn’t have let the unexpected visitor in out of the rain. An asshole would have retaliated upon being accosted. An asshole would have, at some point, called the cops about all this -- or maybe that was more the purview of an intelligent person, which made him, if anything, an idiot. Not that he would have felt much better about a parting shot of “You are an idiot” -- there just would have been less to disagree with.

Still, the tension gathered in his shoulders loosened in the wake of Jude’s departure. He wondered if he ought to go after, to make sure he didn’t do anything crazy, and settled on not. What he had said before was the truth: he was welcome to take anything he wanted, Near didn’t have any sense of claim to it. Hell, he could burn the place down: the door was close enough for a quick exit. Only the thought that explaining why the house was a pile of ashes weeks after he had inherited it would be sticky inspired a weak shout of, “You’re not going to burn the place down, are you?” that was probably not loud enough to make an impression. And don’t kill the dog. Thought, not said. That would be sticky too, if he ever saw Isa again. Oh, and by the way, about Lew ...

He retrieved the dustcloth from the floor by an unbloodied edge and draped it over the bottle, since conceding to the urge to shatter the glass against the floor would have been uncomfortably violent, not to mention a concession of what had happened. Out of sight instead (if a white protrusion on the bartop counted as out of sight), and, while he would find out soon enough if it was out of mind, he decided to help the process of dismissal along by means of the bar’s contents, grabbing something that approximated and might even be XO in silhouette and toting it to one of the denuded chairs with every intention of nursing the night’s events into that dream the kid was so hung up on.

[Jude]

It was a big enough house to hide in. Jude pinballed from one room to the next, from the kitchen to the library to a guest bedroom, from hunger to boredom to exhaustion. The rain did not stop. He could hear it in every room of the house, sometimes close, sometimes far, but always there. Dizzy with the weight of the world, it took hours for Jude to settle himself again, to find the dark center within. The planets settled back into their orbits. The great known once more suffused him. He slept, finally, when all was once more right - or wrong, to be more to the point.

He had not been able to comprehend the idea of being refused. It had been a notion lightly drawn in his great sketch of a scenario, but now, with Near, it had come into focus. Rejection was a real possibility. The End was a real possibility. The fruitlessness of struggle became clear to Jude, just as he fell asleep, a fully-grown tree with barren branches. Perhaps it would all end as They claimed it would. That was fine. But he would not be party to it.

He woke in the night, around four, when restlessness interrupted dreamlessness. He laid in bed, staring into the darkness above him, waiting to see if waking was a mistake, if sleep would come for him again. No, not yet.

Jude knew that he could not stay. There was no point in staying here, with nothing to gain but irritation. He supposed he ought to say goodbye to the house properly, thank it for its watchfulness, its shelter. The house knew the truth. How hard, Jude thought, for it to bear that truth, on top of everything else it held up.

He went down to the cellar.

Calling worked no differently underground than it did aboveground, but the atmosphere was much more conducive to persuasion, so the family had always encouraged its patrons to cultivate a dark, isolated place for Jude's visits. The door to the cellar was locked, but like the latch in the barroom, the lock forgot itself when Jude grasped the knob. Down he went, his footfalls soft, his bare feet picking up dust as he strode between the bottles. At the back of one wall, he dragged his nails over the stone, waiting for one to catch. When the stone caved beneath his hand, sinking into the wall, the rest of the wall gave in turn, swinging in. Behind the wall was the room.

Well, technically two rooms.

The first room was a sitting area, with long wooden benches bolted to the floor on two sides. In the center of the room, four feet in diameter, a sigil had been carved into the floor - no mere pentagram, no soothing 'Om', but something else, something more menacing and more complex, curling snake-lines and fiery tongues of flame, all connecting to one great circle at its edge. The room beyond the first room, behind a modest wooden door, had been Jude's room, when he stayed here.

He didn't need to go in there.

The mounted pillar lanterns still held their candles, though it had been long since they were lit. Jude sat down on one of the benches and folded his hands; one by one, the candles flickered to life. This was where Courtland had sat, Jude remembered, and there Jude had been, on the floor, with his sister, looking back. How strange the view was from here.

[Near]

One of the problems surrounding this “have you ever had a nightmare that felt so real” business (if he was going to do more than scoff) was that he never remembered his dreams.  Not really.  Not like sitting down wide-eyed and pointing, “you were there, and you were there, and you.”   Not like Shay rolling over in bed and jostling him awake to tell him I just dreamed you strangled me to death in the Subway bathroom and Near just shaking his head because other people’s dream narratives always struck him as tedious or grating, but that was, at least in part, thanks to the inability to reciprocate making him feel that he had been cheated out of an experience he was due simply by dint of his being human, like eating or sex.

He never really remembered his dreams.  But he assumed he had them from the shadows they cast.  He woke, often enough, with impressions.  Heavy.  Negative, usually.  Emotions that, in spite of disconnection from their antecedent, would bleed into everything he thought and said and did until time and the concerns of the day washed them out.  Maybe one night Dream Shay strangled Dream Near to death in the Subway bathroom -- come morning, what Real Near had left was an inexplicable wariness toward Real Shay that he might have shaken more easily if he could trace it back to its source.

Now he woke up all awkward angles in a chair not made for sleeping, neck sore and fingers still wrapped around the bottle of cognac, which he lowered to the ground and released before standing up to crack his back and knuckles and probe the outlines of the sense of dread that had permeated through him since he closed his eyes.  He couldn’t tell where it came from -- if it was the same as before but amplified, or if it was new and separate from The Kid and his exhibition.  What he knew was that his eyes wanted light and his ears wanted sound almost as much as his throat wanted water, so he flipped every wall switch he could find over the course of a bleary stumble into the kitchen.

As he leaned under the gooseneck faucet, slurping water out of cupped palms, he became aware that the cellar door was cracked open.  The locked cellar door.   The locked cellar door that he had every intention of leaving closed and locked forever because the thought of opening it was a tarantula crawling up his shoulderblade.  But he had told Jude to do whatever he wanted …  Two steps toward it, wanting to close it again but not wanting to entomb the kid, he shouted out, hoarse, “You down there?”

[Jude]

Jude doesn't dream either. The reason he uses 'dream' and 'nightmare' is because those are the words he's heard the family use. They describe access to a reality that does not feel real, that even contradicts what people know to be true. For Jude, the bounds of reality have always been pushed out much further. He is like a fish trying to explain water.

Sitting on the bench, Jude sank into his thoughts. He remembered seeing Courtland from that place on the floor, but in that moment, with blood on his hands, he hadn't really been here. In those moments, he was only half listening to the people in the room, because the rest of him was listening to Them. He could hear Their murmurs, Their encouragements, Their plans. They told him what to do next. He was only a child, but in his mind's eye, he could see enormous tunnels, brightly-lit laboratories, crimson lasers, people in white coats arguing with one another. Sometimes he saw a lone person bent over their desk, their hands in their hair; the person would then look to their computer, and their face would change. They needed a rip in the tightly-woven fabric of space and time to join Jude and his kind. Money was needed to forge the dagger that would tear that tapestry. Courtland was just one of many patrons, as the family went from estate to estate, rattling their tin cup.

Jude hadn't talked to Them since he ran away. He didn't want to hear what They had to say.

Someone was calling down to him. He couldn't make out the word, but he heard the sound. He shouted back, "Yes?" It wouldn't matter if Near shut the door. No door was shut for Jude.

[Near]

He hoped, after tossing his question down the stairwell and lurching back like something might fly out at him in response, for silence.  Even the ominous subterranean silence that was the only kind he could imagine coming from the cellar.  Silence, and he could shut the door and find a more comfortable place than that chair to sleep off headache he could sense impending just beyond the edges of his sight.

Instead he got a “yes” and a surge of exasperation tempered with a level of apprehension at the idea of anyone being down there that, rationally, was unwarranted: it was a damn wine cellar.  Presumably going up and down had been a commonplace activity when the house was lived-in, and it wasn’t as if Near had ever been the type to balk at a musty basement before.  Hell, he’d lived in basement apartments that were probably more sinister than what was really down there.

But now he had to count Jude among what was down there.  Of course he was down there, because whatever else he might be, whether he was making an effort to or not, he excelled at pushing Near’s buttons, and the wine cellar was a giant red button Near was trying not to direct too much thought toward.  Wasn’t he supposed to have gone home by now?

“Why?” he yelled back, not scratchily enough to disguise the fact that no answer would ever satisfy the question.  Then, without waiting, louder, “Come back up.”

[Jude]

Why was Jude down here? Because this place was the most familiar to him. This was the foremost stage for all his party tricks. He had slept down here, woken up here, talked to Them here. While he had no intention of reaching out, Jude felt the loss of Their voices the way a city-dweller might miss the background hum of traffic on a dark night in the woods. Sitting down here, Jude felt a closeness to the normalcy he had known, and that helped to soothe the sting of loss. He had come here first, soliciting Near before all others, blindly assuming that the apple couldn't fall far from the tree. Woe unto Jude, discovering Near was a fruit of a different type altogether.

"No!" He wasn't finished yet. Eventually, he would be finished, and then he would leave. He would leave when he was finished, and no sooner. These three sentences swam through Jude's head like three goldfish in a single bowl, looping aimlessly in their clear confine. Why did Near feel the need to rush him? Jude wasn't bothering him anymore.

"You come down here!" This felt like a winning phrase. Either Near would have to come down and accept that Jude was only partially crazy, or he would be too scared to venture further and leave Jude alone.

Or Near might call the police. That would be troublesome.

Invisibly, Jude's mind wandered from the bench, weaving back through the wine bottles and floating halfway up the stairs, where his mind's eye gazed upwards to Near and the light shining down into the dark. Jude wanted to add on, Don't worry, it's almost over, but he knew now that Near would find some way to make him feel stupid about it. Better to watch silently, wait, and see.

[Near]

Jude’s voice slithered up from the gloaming, cellar-dusty. The refusal to return to the surface didn’t come as a surprise. He hadn’t exactly set a precedent for good behavior earlier. But then it was Come down here with almost exactly the same inflection that Isa would turn on Lew when she was being stubborn but that Near couldn’t bring himself to affect in his own conversations with the dog because he was a confirmed laissez-fairest when it came to Lew, and it occurred to him that he really should adopt the same attitude toward the kid, too. Ignore him, turn around and leave him be. Doing otherwise could only aggravate the headache whose throb he could feel beginning at the far corners of his temples. God only knew what he was doing down there ...

In a way, though, that was why he couldn’t.

Contributing to this was the feeling that, while Jude might very well belong to the house in a more significant way than Near did -- or the other way around -- Near wasn’t actually a factor in the Jude/Reaches equation and ruffled at the assumption that he might be called like a dog into a space he had been categorically avoiding. There was a small wooden cutting board on the nearest counter, leaning up against the wall. He picked it up and weighed it in his hand for a second, considered the merits tossing it down the stairs instead of himself.

“Why?” he shot back instead, more a statement about how there was no acceptable reason to summon him into the basement than a request for further information. “That door was locked.” Subtext: it was supposed to stay that way.

[Jude]

Near was one of the most intelligent men on the planet. Somewhere in his life, he had correctly determined that the superior self-serving strategy was to assassinate any curiosity before it became significant. The strategy had functioning maxims: Turn around, don't look back. Don't ask questions. Blink twice, shake your head, and ignore it. Forget about it. Close the door and lock it behind you. He was the anti-thesis of his father. Had the family come to him, begging for change, he would have likely shooed them away, wishing them good luck with their fairy tales.

Without being able to put it into words, Jude understood this. He grasped that Near was, in a way, too clever to get himself mixed up in this mess. Jude envied him, but could not blame him.

"Then don't!" The return shout came belatedly, after Jude considered a longer answer for a handful of seconds, then gave up. To Jude, the idea of 'locked' was thoroughly abstract. It had been demonstrated to him on several occasions: a member of the family had attempted to open a door, or a box, or a lock; they then handed Jude the object or led him to the door, and let him touch it. Not everything opens for everyone, Jude. How inconvenient.